Canada, Nortel and China: Dancing with the Devil?
By Bill King
web posted July 26, 2004
This past June marked the 15 th anniversary of the brutal
suppression by China’s People’s Liberation Army of pro-
democracy student activists, and the thousands of ordinary
citizens who supported them, in Tiananmen Square and
throughout Beijing. Fifteen years later, the Chinese government
continues to oppress its own people by denying them the most
basic democratic rights, such as freedom of expression and the
right to choose their leaders through free elections.
But today there is a new and even more repressive aspect to the
control that the Chinese Communist Party wields over the
Chinese people—an aspect that is apparently being facilitated
by, among others, Canada’s very own Nortel Networks. It’s
something that should be of concern to all Canadians, and that
deserves the attention of the federal government, if our nation’s
oft-stated concern for human rights is to be taken as more than
rhetoric.
In the decade that followed the repression of Tiananmen Square,
many here in the West believed that the internet would bring
increased access to information and ideas in China, and thus
usher in an era of increased freedom. This rosy equation became
almost a truism for the many advocates of technology-inspired
social change during the heady days of the “dot.com” revolution
in the mid to late 1990’s.
Many in the business community also promulgated such a view,
particularly but not exclusively those in the telecommunications
and software sectors, who, as China’s Communist rulers
embraced market mechanisms and integration into the world
economy, drew an overly simplistic and deterministic connection
between “free markets and free minds”.
More than a decade later, there has still been no consummation
of the much anticipated coupling of free(er) markets and free
minds. Despite the opening to the market, the Communist Party
retains as tight a grip as ever on Chinese society. And right from
the very beginning, the regime in Beijing saw the internet as a
threat to its monopoly on information and moved to curtail its
impact—just as Communist dictatorships have always done
when they perceive a threat to their power.
So while the internet in China has expanded at a tremendous rate
since the mid 1990’s, so too has the Communist government’s
attempt to control and censor what Chinese citizens see, read
and write on it. It is by now well known here in the West that
web sites with political content or news that the Communist
Party deems “unfriendly” cannot be accessed in China. And
search engines, even ones based outside China, come up blank
when offensive terms such as “democracy” are entered.
As Amnesty International points out in its most recent report on
the internet in China, there is a long list of items that cannot even
be commented on without threat of punishment by the authorities
:
Signing online petitions, calling for reform and an end to
corruption, planning to set up a pro-democracy party, publishing
“rumours about SARS”, communicating with groups abroad,
opposing the persecution of the Falun Gong and calling for a
review of the 1989 crackdown on the democracy protests are all
examples of activities considered by the authorities to be
"subversive" or to "endanger state security". Such charges almost
always result in prison sentences. (Amnesty International, “
People's Republic of China : Controls tighten as Internet activism
grows ”, January 28, 2004 ).
And this list is far from exhaustive. More disturbing yet is that
through advanced technology the Chinese authorities are
increasingly becoming able not only to filter and censor what
people see and read, but to monitor those who speak out, in real
time, when they use the internet.
The biggest outrage of all though, is that the Chinese government
has created its internet censorship and surveillance system with
the help of North American companies. As described by
Amnesty International in a series of reports in 2002 and again
this year; by Greg Walton of Canada’s International Centre for
Human Rights and Democratic Development in his 2001 report
entitled “China’s Golden Shield”; by Ethan Guttman in his recent
book Losing the New China; and by articles in the mainstream
press ranging from the Asia Pacific Post to Newsweek
International, companies such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and
Yahoo have knowingly provided the Chinese government with
the technology needed to carry out its filtering, monitoring and
surveillance activities. [1]
A more troubling question, especially for Canadians, is the role in
all this of Nortel Networks. Far from playing a minor role in
providing China with the technology needed for its repressive
policies, the Canadian company has in fact been singled out as a
main player. As Ethan Guttman puts it in his book, Nortel,
“…aggressively went after the surveillance market in China”.
And in the most comprehensive report on the subject, “China’s
Golden Shield”, Greg Walton details how Nortel marketed its
technology to China’s state security apparatus, the Ministry of
Public Security (MPS), for their “Golden Shield” surveillance
project—a project that reaches beyond the internet:
At the Security China 2000 conference Nortel Networks was
promoting the JungleMUX digital surveillance network and its
OPTera Metro portfolio to the MPS. JungleMUX is a state-of-
the-art system for transporting surveillance video from a network
of remote cameras back to a control centre. [….] One of the
stated objectives of the Golden Shield project is the
establishment of a nationwide network of closed-circuit television
or CCTV cameras in public spaces to improve police response
times to outbreaks of social unrest [….] Such a system requires
advanced network architecture, capable of spanning a country as
large as China, and Nortel’s presentation of its JungleMUX
system at Security China 2000 spoke directly to that need.
(Greg Walton, “China’s Golden Shield”, International Centre for
Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2001).
Is this what a Canadian company should be doing in China? And
how are Nortel’s activities in China consistent with Foreign
Affairs Canada’s claim that, “ Canada remains very concerned
about the human rights situation in China ”? It also begs the more
important question: what is the Canadian government doing
about this?
To date, the Liberal government’s approach to China has been
based on the belief that, “… engagement, rather than isolation,
will effect a sustained improvement in the human rights situation”.
But China is now our third largest trading partner and our largest
source of new immigrants; any talk of Canada “isolating” China
today is at best a red herring.
The question that needs to be posed is what type of engagement
Canada is to have with China . And surely, it should not be the
type that says “anything goes” for Canadian companies in their
dealings with China ’s Communist dictators. At the end of the
day, for the Canadian government to be closing its eyes while
Canadian companies help the Chinese government do its dirty
work is not “engagement”. It’s appeasement.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves on our support for human
rights and democratic values. In order for this commitment to be
made tangible, and not be just so many words on paper, there
must be a clear linkage between trade and human rights. But
more than mere expressions of concern, there are at least two
specific areas with regards to trade with China that should be
addressed.
The first is that there is currently no federal government body that
addresses the non-economic aspects of Canadian trade with
China. In the United States there is the bi-partisan commission
called the United States-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, whose mandate is “to review the national security
implications of trade and economic ties between the United
States and the People's Republic of China”. While Canadian and
US interests are of course very different with regards to China,
and any Canadian body would have a much different mandate
than an equivalent American one, the underlying idea of closely
observing all possible ramifications of trade with China is a sound
one. Given the allegations against Nortel, Canada needs a
federal watchdog committee to monitor companies that are doing
business with the Chinese government.
The second is that while the federal Export and Import Controls
Bureau (which is designed to provide controls on foreign trade),
has controls in place to prevent the provision of dual-use
technology and military goods to countries that “threaten
Canada’s security… and/or abuse the human rights of their own
citizens”, there appear to be no controls in place to prevent
Canadian companies from providing non-military goods to
foreign governments that will use them for human rights abuses.
[2] In light of what is seemingly occurring with Nortel, it would
behoove Foreign Affairs Canada, and its new Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Pierre Pettigrew, to introduce appropriate
controls on the types of goods and services that Canadian
companies can provide the Chinese authorities—even if it means
raising the ire of some Canadian corporations.
Taking such steps would imply a recognition that China will not
“naturally” evolve into a liberal democracy simply due to the
growth of a market economy. Of course, it would be foolish to
deny that there have been many changes in China since 1989.
And no one would confuse today’s China with the Stalinist
throwback that is North Korea. Yet China still remains a
repressive Communist dictatorship, as its jails and torture
chambers testify to, and the nature of the regime must by
definition lend a different quality to the nature of our trading
relationship with it. We cannot afford to proceed with “business
as usual” as if China were any other non-Communist trading
partner.
The Chinese people deserve our support in their difficult struggle
for increased freedom and democracy. If it is not part of
Canadian “tradition” to actively help foster the demise of the
tyrants in Beijing, we at the very least should not be aiding and
abetting the oppression of the Chinese people through our
corporations. The fact that the Canadian government has not
taken any action or even commented on the nature of Nortel’s
business dealings with the Chinese government raises the
question of how serious Canada’s declared concern for human
rights in China really is. We owe the memory of those who died
in Tiananmen Square and throughout Beijing much more than
that.
Bill King is a freelance writer in Surrey, BC. His writings have
appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and Vancouver Sun.
Footnotes:
[1] Amnesty International, "People's Republic of China: State
Control of the Internet in China", 26 November, 2002,
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa170072002;
Amnesty International, "People's Republic of China: State
Control of the Internet in China: Appeal Cases", 26 November
2002, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa170462002;
Amnesty International, "People's Republic of China: Controls
tighten as Internet activism grows", 28 January, 2004,
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa170012004; Greg
Walton, "China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the
Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's
Republic of China", International Centre for Human Rights and
Democratic Development, 2001,
http:
//www.ichrdd.ca/english/commdoc/publications/globalization/gol
denShieldEng.html; Ethan Gutmann, Losing the New China
(Encounter Books: 2004); Paul Mooney, "China's Cyber
Crackdown", Newsweek International, 16 December, 2002,
http://www.pjmooney.com/cybernwk.shtml; Asia Pacific Post,
"Why is Nortel helping China jail Internet users?", June 17,
2004, http://www.asianpacificpost.com/news/article/136.html.
[2] "About the Export and Import Controls Bureau (EICB)" ,
Export and Import Controls Bureau, Department of International
Affairs and International Trade,
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/eicb/eicbintro-en.asp.
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